U.S. Sen. Murray faces challenge from former Washington state GOP Chairman Vance

At its core, Washington’s U.S. Senate race this year might be reduced to a person who says he wants to be an agent of change and another who says she’s been working for change for almost a quarter of a century.

Democrat Patty Murray, seeking her fifth term in the Senate, points to work she’s done on a wide variety of issues over the last 24 years, including highway projects, education and the budget, and talks about tackling voters’ current concerns about the Zika virus, economic uncertainty and access to mental health care.

To her, the job description is what it was in 1992 when, as a relatively young and junior state legislator, she was audacious enough to challenge a sitting senator from her own party: “Giving voice to people who don’t have a voice.”

That sitting senator, Brock Adams, pulled out of his re-election campaign in the midst of a sex scandal, and Murray beat a Republican congressman from King County to win the seat. In later elections she dispatched two more sitting U.S. House members – one from Vancouver, one from Spokane – and a well-known Republican legislator to hold it.

This year she faces Chris Vance, a former legislator, King County councilman, state GOP chairman and sometime pundit. Like most challengers, he’s asking voters who aren’t happy with the way things are to blame Murray and support him.

Vance bills himself as a different kind of Republican than the national profile, one who harkens back to fiscally conservative social moderates like Dan Evans and Slade Gorton, the only Republicans to be sent to the U.S. Senate from Washington in the last 64 years. He distinguished himself from the national party in May when he announced he wouldn’t support Donald Trump, and unlike some early Trump critics has not changed course.

“I have to make it clear I am not part of the national message. I am not like (Senate Majority Leader) Mitch McConnell,” he said in a recent interview.

In his latest campaign video on YouTube, Vance tries to underline those differences by saying he believes climate change is real – and at least partly a result of human activity, he added in the interview. He has stressed that he’s not aligned with the national GOP on certain wedge issues.

“I won’t vote for laws that overturn Washington voters’ decisions on marriage, abortion or marijuana,” he says.

That sounds good, Murray countered, but Congress isn’t likely to try to overturn state laws on those topics. But Republicans regularly try to chip away at reproductive health issues through back-door methods, such as cutting funding for Planned Parenthood in a bill designed to provide money to fight the Zika virus or blocking Veterans Affairs coverage of in vitro fertilization for wounded vets, she said.

One of Murray’s predecessors, the late Sen. Warren G. Magnuson, once remarked that the Senate was a ranch with two kinds of horses: show horses and work horses. If that’s the case, Murray is proud to be the latter.

As part of that work ethic, Murray flies back to the state from Washington, D.C., almost every weekend. She spent the August recess criss-crossing the state on a wide range of meetings, talking with constituents – who also will be this fall’s voters – about issues including Zika, wildfires, opioid addiction and veterans issues.

“I was not elected to go on Sunday talk shows and scream at people on the other side,” she said. “When you’re first elected, you want change to be right now. You learn the only way things change is with really hard work.”

Vance is trying to convince enough voters that the change she’s wrought over four terms is either not enough or the wrong kind. If people are unhappy with partisan gridlock in Congress, they should at least partly blame Murray, he contends, who is high up in the Senate Democratic hierarchy and is a regular party vote.

Murray’s campaign is quick to counter that argument with a string of bipartisan efforts in which she’s been involved, including a budget deal with Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., before he became House speaker and a list of compliments from other Republicans for working “across the aisle.” Among the list of laudatory quotes is always one from Vance himself in 2013, who in his role as a political analyst called her an incredibly skilled lawmaker.

Sharing the November ballot with the presidential candidates is a bigger challenge for Vance than Murray. Any Democrat has a built-in advantage in a state that hasn’t gone for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984, but Vance also angered some Washington Republicans by publicly disavowing Trump. He came through the August primary without significant GOP opposition and believes he’ll get the votes of more than 80 percent of the Trump supporters and do even better with Republicans who aren’t happy with their party’s nominee.

The good news for Vance in the August primary is he finished far ahead of the other 15 challengers with 28 percent of the vote. The bad news was that Murray practically lapped him, pulling in 54 percent.

The most recent Elway Poll has Trump at 24 percent of the vote and Hillary Clinton at 43 percent in the state, and only the most ardent Republicans hold out hope their presidential nominee will win Washington. In a move calculated to capture some independent votes – although arguably conceding four more years of a Democrat in the White House – Vance has been arguing that re-electing Murray would be giving Clinton a “rubber stamp” in the Senate.

Murray scoffs at the rubber stamp description but agrees she’s a longtime Clinton friend and ally. Her first years in Congress coincided with Clinton’s time as first lady, and they later served together in the Senate. Because of that, Murray said, Clinton knows she’ll fight for the state on any issue. And if the senior senator from Washington calls the Oval Office over the next four years, “she’ll take my call.”

An even bigger disparity facing Vance than the state’s partisan split is the difference in campaign money. In the most recent Federal Election Commission reports from mid-July, Murray had spent about $2.9 million on her campaign and had another $7 million sitting in the bank. Vance had spent about $285,000 and had $26,000 left. Although he’s been raising money since, so has she, and the prospects for an infusion of campaign cash from national Republican sources gets dimmer as the party shifts money to defend seats it thought a few months ago were safe.

Vance said he won’t have the money for a big wave of television ads before Nov. 8 but insists he’ll have enough from Washington state supporters for a “robust digital campaign” that targets social media and online sites where more and more people, particularly young voters, get their news and entertainment.

He’s also counting on exposure from two debates sponsored by a coalition of colleges, civic groups and news organizations that will be televised statewide. The first is at Gonzaga University on Oct. 16.

While Murray said that while she welcomes the debates as a chance to tell voters what she believes, she doesn’t believe they’re as crucial as Vance suggests for the final decision on marking the ballot: “I think voters get information in a lot of different ways.”